Porous border a portal for potential terrorists

September 15, 2003|By E.A. Torriero, Tribune staff reporter.

BADRAH, Iraq — Smugglers on motorcycles ferry Arab insurgents into Iraq across the rugged desert from neighboring Iran, while former Iraqi army officers guide anti-American Afghan veterans through minefields left over from the Iran-Iraq war.

As President Bush casts Iraq as the latest front line in the war against global terrorism, porous border crossings such as this one between Iraq and Iran are proving to be leaky gateways for potential terrorists, according to Western and Iraqi intelligence officials.

"If he spoke Persian and disguised himself, [Osama] bin Laden could go in and out and we wouldn't know it," said Iraqi police Capt. Ahmed Ridtha, who supervises an overwhelmed staff of 15 border guards at this remote outpost 110 miles east of Baghdad. "We have no idea who crosses these borders."

For about 1,900 miles around Iraq's perimeter, a variety of violent anti-American organizations are sending militants to engineer bombings and attacks on U.S.-led forces, say senior American officials and Iraqi police along the borders.

Once in Iraq, some are loosely aligning with loyalists of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein who have access to caches of leftover munitions for bombs, the officials said.

"We are unhappy about the fact that people come across the Syrian and Iranian border," U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said during his recent visit to Iraq.

The roster of border incursions is alarming, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

Hezbollah-backed fighters based in Lebanon reportedly have entered Iraq from Syria to the northwest. In recent days, U.S. soldiers have detained several men of Arab origin carrying explosives who came in across Syrian lines, the U.S. military said.

Along Iraq's border with Jordan, Al Qaeda operatives are using fake identities and posing as students to infiltrate Iraq, U.S. military officials said.

From the south, radicals from Yemen and Egypt are filtering in from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to plot violence, according to coalition authorities.

And from Iran, hidden among thousands of Shiites who come to worship at the Iraqi holy sites of Karbala and Najaf are followers of bin Laden dressed as pilgrims, Iraqi police said.

Two weeks ago, Iraqi police in the provincial capital of Kut detained a van from Iran that was packed with explosives, officers said. Police probing the huge blast last month at a Shiite shrine in Najaf are exploring links to foreign insurgents who may have come across the border here.

"The borders are sieves," a senior coalition official said. "We must tighten them--and fast."

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said it would take a "Berlin-like" wall to seal Iraq's border with Iran.

Little progress made

Despite aerial surveillance, sophisticated intelligence-gathering and the deployment of more U.S. and coalition forces to the borders, American officials and Iraqi police concede they are making little progress.

Iraqi border guard forces number 13,000. Tens of thousands of coalition troops would be needed to get the borders under control, commanders say.

"It's a question of money and resources," said Ukrainian Army Lt. Col. Sementic Valeriy, whose unit took over surveillance of the border at Badrah this month from a contingent of U.S. Marines. "We try to patrol, but we cannot be everywhere."

Under the Hussein regime, Iraqi borders were tightly monitored, and visas were required for visitors. Few Iraqis were allowed to travel abroad.

Iraqi police Lt. Col. Alaa Maryoosh, a former army officer who heads the police station in the town nearest to this frontier, blames U.S. forces for not anticipating the border troubles.

"We never had terrorism before in Iraq," he said. "This is the Americans' fault."

Enforcement varies

With no government, no laws and little manpower, enforcement varies widely along Iraq's frontier. The Americans tightly control the Jordanian crossing, where foreigners entering Iraq go through an immigration office that stamps passports.

But on the opposite side of Iraq, the crossing into the country from Iran is chaotic.

Closed for more than 20 years since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, the border was opened by the coalition and the Iraqi Governing Council this summer to allow Shiites to make pilgrimages to some of the holiest sites in their religion.

Thousands of Iranians arrive daily in buses and vans at a desert outpost. Many of them have no passports but are allowed by Iranian authorities to cross into Iraq anyway, Iraqi police said.

Iraqi border guards rummage through their luggage looking for weapons and drugs smuggled from Afghanistan. But often the crowds overwhelm them, and many items elude inspection.

Hundreds of Arabs and other foreigners lacking proper paperwork in Iran are smuggled into Iraq every day by Iranian and Iraqi guides, officials said; some simply walk into Iraq across a dry riverbed.

At night, the riverbed turns into desert byway with headlights guiding Iranian vehicles into Iraq. Drivers dispose of their Iranian license plates.

"Under what laws can we stop them?" asked Ridtha, the police captain. "We have no government and no immigration policy. I have no authority to keep them out or force them to leave."